Incredible Heights and Depths

The thing is, I’d run Blackrock Spire so many times on my various level eighty characters. Farmed it, even, if you will. Of all the instances out there, it is one where I know pretty well how to get through – at least the Upper part. Kill the rooms of channeling orcs, open the door, head through the trash to the Rookery, up the ramp on the right – through the room with the mini-boss rare spawns, jump down off the balcony to end up fighting Rend, which opens the door where you can run through to The Beast and Drakkisath. I’d wanted the dungeon one set chestpiece, you see. For my mage, and then my druid.

I had only a vague understanding that UBRS, perhaps, might not be a five person instance. This was my thinking. In fact, UBRS might want just a few more people that are level 60. Like, oh… ten, or so.

So when the pug said, “I think we could get the Jenkins achievement with this group,” I didn’t argue. There was a good chance we could have even done it. Heck, we had four paladins and a shaman. That’s an overpowered group, isn’t it? And we really were a bit overpowered. We mowed down the trash packs, killed the fire elemental guy, and were moving at a brisk clip – right up until the attempt to get the achievement left us splat, five smears on the ground.

Like so. Also, one thing not to say to a pug group that just wiped in UBRS: "Hey, this is going to make an AWESOME screenshot for my blog!" No, I didn't say it!

And after that, well heck, we were already in UBRS, weren’t we? Why not keep going? So we did, for awhile. The shaman wasn’t impressed with the plan, so she dropped group. (Foreshadowing)… We picked up another person immediately and killed Rend Blackhand and his trash. We killed some more trash. It was only when we reached The Beast that I began to have a sinking feeling. “It has 80K HP and a skull!” one of the other paladins said.

Hm, so it did. Somehow, being level 80, I hadn’t noticed this important fact the other times I’d come here. Well, they were game to give it a try, and so was I. Unfortunately being a ret paladin and overgearing the tank led me to commit the ultimate DPS crime – I pulled aggro and went splat pretty early on. The rest of the group managed to get The Beast to about 50% health. Which is pretty good, really! Just about half what you’d expect to need – for a monster designed to be killed by ten people and not five. Or four, really, since one was decorating the ground, but who’s counting?

We wiped on trash. And then the healer had to leave. So we re-queued, this time with me healing. We accidentally pulled two groups and the tank died. So we tried again and just got the one group, and the tank died. These mobs were about four levels higher than us, at this point. Then he got mad and left, and we re-queued once more.

Incidentally: best undocumented pug change ever. When someone joins your group to replace someone else – they appear where you are instead of at the beginning of the instance. Thank you, thank you, thank you again, Blizz. This is awesome.

Except that where we were, at this point, was a short distance from Drakkisath who we were pretty sure we couldn’t kill, and a long way from LBRS, where we’d been intended to go in the first place. We had to find another tank and DPS, but that didn’t take much time at all. We ran back to gamely start LBRS. Our tank didn’t know where he was going, but I sort of did. We got as far as the spiders before I realized that I really had to go – the whole endeavor had taken, so far, two hours. I suppose the only real benefit was that we were getting XP the whole time. I hated having to leave the group “mid-instance,” as it were, but I’d only scheduled about two hours for the endeavor in the first place.

Hours it takes to struggle through incomplete portions of both Upper and Lower Black Rock Spire: Two

Black Rock Spire wipes: Five.

Black Rock Spire achievements: Zero.

The feeling you get when you realize you’ve been causing your poor pug to beat its collective head against a wall that was intended for twice as many players, and at a higher level?

Priceless.

I’m going to cheat and get my husband’s warrior to go back with me at some later time (perhaps when the mobs no longer offer XP). Even though I didn’t get the achievements, I feel I’ve earned them!

Vid’s also level 59 now. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to finish the Dire Maul and the other instances. I may queue for Hogwarts Scholomance specifically because I like it and I’d hate to miss out on it.

9 responses to “Incredible Heights and Depths”

I actually managed to clear out UBRS with a random 5 man group, but the group included my character, who had reasonably good tanking gear having tanked all the way from 15, a healer priest and a rogue who were really twinked out (the priest had Benediction, plus they had some level 60 raid gear), and my friend on his level 63 paladin.

In a later group that (eventually) cleared LBRS one dude kept saying “Let’s do Jenkins!”, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t something that you’d want to do with 5 level-appropriate people, so I just shot him down. I was pretty surprised by how long LBRS was. It was really about as long as BRD, or at least as long as half of it. I didn’t know where I was going which didn’t help, but others sort of did. But yeah, I did LBRS once, and never again. There are tons of dungeons in this level range so it isn’t a huge problem, unlike the BRD fest that was the early 50s.

Yeah, I actually believe a five-man group is capable of it, but the majority of us were 57-58 (and myself the lone 59), so we were really pushing it. I’m sure they’re all out there cursing my name now. “She led us here! That…that…paladin.” Or they’ve forgotten all about it. ;)

I think I’ve only been in UBRS once, as my hunter. I think I was running it partially for the achievement and partially to run my friend (who was the right level) through for drops. I don’t know the instance very well so I’m not even sure how this happened, but I either got knocked back or Disengaged off the balcony into the area where you fight Rend…and inadvertently started the event while he was still up above, frantically dodging a roaming patrol we had missed on our way in.

The replacement player zoning in right at you IS an incredible change! I was surprised by this in a Nexus run yesterday, after a DPS had to leave, and our replacement DPS just popped into sight. It’s kind of funny though, and does raise some interesting questions. I wonder if you have to be out of combat before someone gets warped in? What if you warp in just in time to eat a Skadi cleave to the face? Or even worse, what if it’s Oculus and everyone else is already on their drakes? Will the new person pop in and plummet to their death? The possibilities are endless!

Interestingly, I never managed to draw LBRS, UBRS, Scholomance, or (old) Stratholme when I was levelling my little priest through that range. It was one Blackrock Depths run after another, until finally at last I got a few trips to Dire Maul to carry me over the boundary between 57 and 58. As epic and as interesting as BRD is, I’m quite tired of it now. I hope you are able to draw into Scholomance! That’s a fun instance for sure!

I’m fairly sure that from level 50 to level 56, I never got anything from the “random” dungeon finder except BRD. I guess you could say that’s just the luck of the dice, but with dice like those, who needs enemies? :) As soon as I hit level 58, I trundled her off to the Dark Portal, bought her a gryphon’s license, and never looked back.

“Incidentally: best undocumented pug change ever. When someone joins your group to replace someone else – they appear where you are instead of at the beginning of the instance. Thank you, thank you, thank you again, Blizz. This is awesome.”

Amen to that. There have been times when I’ve been the replacement, and I’m loitering around the entrance thinking “man, the lag is bad today.” This saves that issue completely.